Six Strikes Is Just 'Soft SOPA'

from the more-futility-and-stupidity dept

The nationwide Six Strikes Copyright Alert System continues to roll out with many of the details still shrouded in secrecy. The few aspects of the system that can be guaranteed are negative: open WiFi could become a thing of the past and non-infringers are likely to be swept up in the CAS net.

Say you send out one of those mailers for a subscription to Time Magazine. And you check the box that says bill me later. Let's say that they start sending you Time Magazine, and after 2 or 3 issues they send you the bill, and you never pay. But in the meantime you have 6 or 8 issues before they cut you off for not paying. My proposal is let's adopt Six Strikes and knock somebody off the postal system. You don't pay for it, you don't get to use the postal service any longer. Or let's say somebody blows through a toll plaza 6 times, does that mean you don't ever use the highways anymore?

Now, some might argue that this is no different than, say, revoking a driver's license after certain number of DUIs. I'd argue it's closer to punishing a boiler-room scammer with loss of telephone privileges. It's one thing to limit one specific activity (driving/driving drunk) as a deterrent. (After all, the person with multiple DUIs can still walk places, use public transportation and drink to his heart's content.) It's quite another to block off an entire form of communication simply because the infringement was committed via an internet connection.

This urge to sever infringers from their internet connections (or slow the connection to nearly-unusable speeds) stems from the copyright industries' paranoia about all things internet-related. One needs look no further than the MPAA's knee jerk reaction to Google's plan to provide 1gb up/down internet to Kansas City. From its limited viewpoint, the only thing anyone does with a fast internet connection is commit high speed infringement.

This paranoia goes hand-in-hand with the industries' general panic over every new technology that threatens their control over distribution.

The function of copyright law as it has evolved is indeed to disrupt innovation and to disrupt new technologies that threaten the interest of copyright holders. Frankly all copyright legislation has been in reaction to new technologies that are developed. And copyright law has sought as its purpose, interfering with, limiting, pampering and indeed disrupting innovation of technology, business plans, even disruption of consumer choice.

Bridges refers to the Six Strikes plan as "Soft SOPA." Even though SOPA itself was killed off, certain aspects still remain and are being incorporated into other legislation and "voluntary" initiatives like the Copyright Alert System.

Even though SOPA failed, SOPA is now in some respects the law of the land. Because we now have Soft SOPA. We have the government putting pressure on advertising networks and putting pressure on payment processors, unofficially, to take the same measures that SOPA was going to require them to [do]. But now it's a sort of 'if you know what's good for you, could you pretty please, wink-wink' method.

There are payment processors notifying companies that they are no longer willing to process payments for them. It's happening. It happened with three of my clients... [W]e have advertisers blacklisting certain sites, and telling sites. 'We're not going to place advertising on your site because people tell us you're not a good site.' So that's happening. And it's being done as "Oh it's just a private decision."

In the long run, it appears the RIAA, MPAA and various others have still managed to push their agenda through. The only difference is the lack of an official government mandate. Instead, we're seeing something a bit shadier -- SOPA's directives presented as "cooperation" between the copyright industry and private companies.

This is still business as usual for the industry and their support system within the US government. As was pointed out here (both before and after SOPA's defeat), the legal authority to shut down foreign sites the RIAA/MPAA sought when pushing this bill seemed redundant. ICE and the DOJ were already shuttering foreign sites without the aid of this supposedly essential anti-piracy legislation.

What's happening now is a continuation of that process. The content industries already have the DOJ/ICE working for them. Now, they're hoping that a blend of "voluntary" alert systems and heavy-handed "suggestions" will finish the job. And whoever gets mangled in the machinery is simply the price of "doing business." After all, it won't affect anyone but the sites and users knocked offline.

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Kansas Citian here!

Can't wait to get my Google Fiber and start pirating all that MPAA/RIAA goodness. I figure in a week I'll have more content than I could ever consume in the next five years. Hmm.... wonder what I'll do with all that Google Fiber then?

The US government kicking people off the Internet and punishing us for this stuff through SOPA/ACTA? OMG, big government tyranny!

Giant corporations kicking your off the Internet and punishing you for the same thing by taking advantage of bad laws already on the book? What's the problem with that, why's it a story?

If we're to protect our rights and freedoms we need to watch out for not just the government taking them, but other rich individuals and big corporations/groups with the money and power to abuse the current system.

I think the DUI comparison is valid, and that highlighting the differences between the two is a better argument than bringing up another bad comparison. The main difference is that, when someone's license is revoked, it's because they've been cited and either plead guilty or convicted in a court of law. With a six strikes system, people are punished on allegations that don't need to proven in court. Best case is that it's presumption of guilt with the burden of proof placed on the accused. Worst case is that the strikes remain even if someone has been found innocent in court, in which case the courts have been completely nullified. That's the point that needs to be focused on.

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Which is something that confuses me greatly. Why are the courts allowing Six Strikes through at all? If I were a judge and I learned that private industries had basically rendered my system obsolete and were acting as their own judicial system, beholden to nobody, I'd be livid (well, about as livid as I am now).

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> If I were a judge and I learned that
> private industries had basically rendered
> my system obsolete and were acting as their
> own judicial system, beholden to nobody,
> I'd be livid

You could be as livid as you like, but judges aren't gods or dictators and in a free society, private parties are free to contract with each other to do business however they like, subject to statutory restriction.

As there is no law against an ISP implementing a six-strike system, a contract between an ISP and its customers which requires such a system is perfectly valid. No matter how livid some judge gets about it.

Oh, and the judicial system, as an arm of the government, belongs to the people, not the judges. If you're a judge and you're pissed off because someone's intruding on what you see as 'your system', then you've got some serious attitude problems from the get-go.

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Problem here is, its not a contract between an ISP and its customers. Its an agreement between two industries, when Industry A accuses the customers of Industry B of breaking the law, and the two industries agreeing to settle the dispute entirely outside the courts, where ostensibly all men are equal.
No-one working for either Hollywood or the ISPs is empowered to sort through accusations on their own. That's the government, which is ostensibly by the people and for the people. Your car dealer doesn't repossess your car because someone complained to them. Your phone company doesn't disconnect your phone just because someone complained to them. What's happening is that a group of industries are taking the power and authority of the courts, the judicial system, and for some reason, no-one in the court system is acting out against it.

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> What's happening is that a group of
> industries are taking the power and
> authority of the courts, the judicial
> system, and for some reason, no-one in
> the court system is acting out against it.

That's because private dispute settlement systems aren't illegal. In fact, trying to make them illegal would be illegal (in the sense of unconstitutional).

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IANAL, but that would be in the case of two parties, if it were strictly the customers and the ISPs. The problem here is, there's THREE parties. Again, if someone were to complain to your car dealership/bank you got the car loan from that they saw a car with your licence plate driving on their private land, you'd be livid if the dealership/bank just repossessed your car (or sent engineers out to limit its max speed to far below the legal speed limit). You'd have been punished with no opportunity to dispute.
Oh, and as a regular here, I'm pretty sure you do understand that finding a different ISP is simply not an option for most US citizens? The term monopoly is literal when it comes to certain ISPs in certain towns/cities.

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"Again, if someone were to complain to your car dealership/bank you got the car loan from that they saw a car with your licence plate driving on their private land, you'd be livid if the dealership/bank just repossessed your car (or sent engineers out to limit its max speed to far below the legal speed limit). You'd have been punished with no opportunity to dispute."

It boils down real simple.

ISP is punishing customer because of claims of illegal activity. Illegal activity is easy to prove as there will be Court documents of your conviction. No conviction? No illegal activity.

And what would you prefer?

Seriously. It's hilarious to watch this site slag off anything that might even hurt the feelings of the infringing, cheapass couch potatoes who take, take and continue to take.

Face it. There are laws against what you celebrate, laws passed and hardened by a long stream of democratically elected representatives. If your freeloading philosophy had any broad support, the laws would have been changed long ago.

But they haven't because the majority of people are forced to work for a living. (Notice how all of the big apologists for file sharing are tenured professors? That's a clue.) They understand that the artists invest time and deserve a chance to charge everyone equally.

Laws are a waste of time without punishment. I would love to see the file "sharing" jerks put on a Carnival Cruise Line to Somalia so they can understand just what it means to be without the laws they hate so much. But we're stuck with these punishments and we might as well give them a chance.

But you might as well come out and take ownership of your hatred of an artist's right to make some money off of his or her's hard work.

The accusations are based on good evidence. If the accused want to protest, they're welcome to do it. But I doubt we'll see very many at all because the cockroaches would rather pay the find and crawl under a rug. Will there be mistakes, perhaps, but they can be fixed. And I'm sure this system will be more accurate than the one we use to put people away for murder.

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"The accusations are based on good evidence."

No its not. IP address =/= who was sitting at the keyboard at that computer (in fact, it won't even identify the computer, just the router. Behind my router, I have a PS3, Xbox 360, a Kindle, a 3DS, two laptops, a desktop computer and an iPad). Imagine if I were to be accused. I don't own all the devices I listed there. And yet, because my name appears on the internet bill, I'm supposed to somehow block all copyright infringement (the only working method is to disconnect yourself from the internet entirely, which is not what I'm paying for) and be punished when someone points a finger in my direction?

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The accused can always sue in the court of law. But this is meant to make life easier for the casual infringer, the kind that complains about being dragged into court and hit with fines of $150,000. If you like, we can go back to the old system that worked so well for Jammie Thomas. The court of law hasn't worked so well for the infringers, you know.

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" But this is meant to make life easier for the casual infringer, "

But...I thought we had quotes from the people pushing for Six Strikes that this is all about stopping the causal infringer, that they know that they can't stop hardcore infringers...
Again, think before you type. You don't. Every single thing you write is so easy to rip apart that you've lost any claim to self-respect.

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"The accused can always sue?!" How does that address 'innocent until proven guilty in a court of law?' All you're doing is agreeing that the burden of proof has been improperly placed on the accused to sue to prove their own innocence. Jammie Thomas is just a red herring here. The fact that she was found to be infringing in a court of law has absolutely nothing to do with the presumption of innocence.

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r u nuts? almost everything today is done over the internet. the only sanctions that should be put in place, provided an accuser has managed to produce a 'reasonable level of proof of infringement', not the accused managed to provide a 'reasonable level of non-infringement' is that downloading is not permitted. to achieve this, slowing a connection to a level that makes downloading unattractive without stopping access to other aspects of the internet, such as email, banking etc. making access almost non-existent or cutting people off completely is way over the top!!

It doesn't stop copyright infringement. Just like how prohibition didn't stop alcohol. Or War on Drugs stopped Marijuana use in the U.S. Or how about cigarettes? They still end up in the hands of a minor even though there's laws against it.

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It doesn't stop it? How do you know? You mean to say, "It doesn't stop ALL of it." And by that logic, we would give up on prosecuting all murder, rape and armed robbery because it doesn't stop all of the crime.

Copyright deserves hefty penalties because the pirates keep ramping up their infringement. If smaller penalties worked, we wouldn't need tougher ones. But jerks like Kim Dotcom parade the millions of ill-gotten gains and their huge mansions in front of the world. Of course that encourages tougher laws.

IF the pirates would just crawl back into the cockroach den from whence they came, we wouldn't need tougher enforcement.

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If murder and rape laws were seen to be so badly written as to drag countless innocents down and punish them with bad evidence, then yes I would be against them too. Thankfully, murder and rape laws are carefully written as to actually require hard evidence and allow the accused an opportunity to defend themselves.

How many times do I have to repeat myself that Six Strikes is all about being punished upon accusation, that that alone is horrible.

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The more prevalent an activity is the harsher the penalties for it should be? You sound like a despot. In a democratic society the more common an activity is the less reprehensible it is. But i'm sure in your little fantasy world where you exercise absolute power and no one questions you your insane ramblings sound like wisdom.

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"And by that logic, we would give up on prosecuting all murder, rape and armed robbery because it doesn't stop all of the crime."

And by your repeated logic, copyright infringement is just as serious as murder, rape and armed robbery. After all, you constantly compare them when this topic is discussed. But thankfully most of the populace aren't as batshit crazy as you. Most people consider copyright infringement only marginally worse than jaywalking. Most people realise copyright is for the "protection" of big corporates, not actual artists and creators, so sympathy for the terrible crime of infringement is pretty thin on the ground.

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Marijuana is LEGAL in several states, both for medical and recreational use.

"Copyright deserves hefty penalties because the pirates keep ramping up their infringement."

bob, to compare this to speeding, the price of a speeding ticket doesn't go up because people drive faster. And, believe me, people do continue to speed even though it's illegal to do so, but you don't see ticket prices going insane, do you? hmm?

"Of course that encourages tougher laws."

And you *DO* realize that tougher laws don't mean jack shit to people when it comes to breaking laws that make no sense, right?

This isn't like murder, rape or armed robbery, bob, NO ONE IS GETTING HURT when someone copies something.

If I make a copy of something, no one gets hurt. If I murder someone, that person's dead.

Copyright infringement is *SO* far down the ladder of importance that it barely registers to people most of the time.

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Yes, that is true.

However...

It's still not ridiculous.

In my state, for example, if you're going above the speed limit in a 70 mile an hour zone (freeway), you get a 5 dollar fine for each mile you're over the speed limit. So, get caught going 80 on the freeway is a 50 dollar fine.

If it was copyright infringement, the fine would be 500,000 dollars and 24 years in prison for the same thing.

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It basically costs LOTS to make the epic adventures with lots of special effects that you fanboys like for your fantasies.

As I've said before, you fanboys are trying to remove even the possibility of recovering "sunk (or fixed) costs" -- Mike just literally say forget them -- while I only want to limit the excesses. BUT when comes down to deciding between you freeloaders and Hollywood: YOU are taking their work-products, which is STEALING.

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Then if movies are worth $10 which we both agree on here, under your logic, pirates should be treated in the same way as someone else who shoplifted or steals $10 worth of stuff. Not sentenced to jail time with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fines, yes?

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"(And shoplifters often go to jail, something that seems to really upset everyone around here.)"

Go on, quote when anyone said that. I suppose the closest you might come to is us saying that shoplifters should face a punishment equal to the crime, plus a reasonable deterrent. If I were to go to Gamestop and steal a game disc, I'd be handed a fine and maybe a few days/weeks in jail, depending on what country I'm in. But...if I were to do the heinous crime of using Bittorent to get the same game, suddenly I'm on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars, which basically equals economic servitude to the copyright industry for the rest of my life.

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You don't appear to know how torrenting works.
You don't share one copy with hundreds and thousands of people. You share hundreds and thousands of 0.1-1.0~ second clips with hundreds of thousands of people equal to approx 0.5-3.0~ copies.
The end result is no different from burning a copy of your new CD for a friend that you yourself received from a friend. Or a mix tape.

Unless you're a seed...that's different but still far, far from the average pirate.

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You do realize that BitTorrent users with a ratio of 1000+ are pretty much non-existant. Maybe you should stop using analogies to address technology you don't understand and just find out how the tech actually works.

Re: And what would you prefer?

You mentioned the word "laws" about five times.

You do realise Six Strikes ISN'T A LAW? Which is in fact, one of the problems, its a private agreement between two industry groups that harms the general public. If it were a law, it would hopefully have been shot down as being unconstitutional for requiring punishment upon accusation, and of turning the concept of innocent until proven guilty on its head.

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Uh, dude. How do you think the parking tickets, speeding tickets and everything else work? The cop accuses them and then the accused has a choice: pay up or contest it. That's the same model here. It's not unconstitutional.

Or would you rather force the accused to hire lawyers to defend themselves in court? Would you rather them go through all of that hoopla that will even more than a fine? Wait. I'm sure you've complained about that path before too. But you'll complain about any enforcement.

And what do you think blesses contracts? Laws. When people sign up for the service, they enter into a contract bound by laws. The system has always allowed parties to find solutions outside of court through arbitration or other schemes. They're just as much a part of the legal system.

So let's hear your solution. How would you punish these cheap, freeloaders? Come on. Would you force them to pay for thousands of hours of lawyer time to argue every single face t of the law? Or maybe you'll agree that a simple fine like this makes sense.

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Wow...you mean, you're okay with your accuser being allowed hide in the shadows? So that once it comes to court...I mean arbitration, you're okay with the guy on the other side of the table being allowed to wear a troll mask and not present any ID or credentials at all?
Again, part of the problem. Being allowed to face your accuser well, face to face, is an age old part of the judicial process and here, its been removed.

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So you really don't believe in a fundamental right to face your accuser or a presumption of innocence. I'm glad you're being so honest and open about what a Kafkaesque take on the rule of law you have.

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Yeah about the speeding tickets...everyone is allowed contest them. Six Strikes? Nope, not in a court of law, and not until after you've been accused at least four times. And then, its going to be down to an arbitrator who, wanting to keep his job, will definitely side with the corporation every single time.

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With a ticket, if you contest it you are not punished until after the case is heard, and the police have to prove wrong doing. With six strikes you are punished first, and can appeal only on limited grounds, you have to prove yourself innocent, the accuser does not have to prove you guilty.

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Uh, dude. How do you think the parking tickets, speeding tickets and everything else work? The cop accuses them and then the accused has a choice: pay up or contest it.

Ooooh. So close. Actually, the cop flags down or pulls over the person currently in the act of speeding, requests identification and registration to confirm the identity of the individual performing the infraction and personally issues them a ticket. After this process is the individuals choice of paying or contesting.

By your model, the cop could pick a name out of a phone book, say 'Yeah.. I'm pretty sure he was on this street that day, he was speeding!' and the person would have to cover lengthy court proceedings and expensive lawyer costs just to be able to tell the judge they didn't even drive their car that day!

Not to mention I've yet to see a speeding ticket for a harmless offence , cost $150,000 and jail time with possible federal charges. I've yet to see legislators seek to outlaw specific automobile manufacterers because their cars are the subject of more speeding infractions than another manufacterers. Hell I haven't even heard of auto manufacterers getting in trouble for advertising car speeds well in excess of any speedlimit in the country.

I have however seen people accused of infringement charges in the six digit range, threatened with jail time simply for being registered with the IP address infringement took place with . I've seen businesses bullied and threatened because 'they contain a higher level of infringement' than others. I've even seen massive takedown campaigns aimed at filelocker services that promote supposedly illegal functionality through their rewards programs.

I don't know about you, but I'm far more concerned about people speeding on the roads with 2 ton murdermachines than by people getting a one dollar song for free.

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> How do you think the parking tickets,
> speeding tickets and everything else work?
> The cop accuses them and then the accused
> has a choice: pay up or contest it.

You might have a point, except:

(1) You don't have to pay an additional fee to contest the ticket; with Six Strikes, you do.

(2) You're not limited to only a certain list of pre-approved defenses, which exclude the defense which will actually exonerate you; with Six Strikes, you are.

(3) You're entitled to a hearing before an impartial judge, whose verdict will be based on the law; with Six Strikes, you're required to have your challenge decided by an arbitrator picked by the group that's accusing you. Pretty much the exact opposite of impartial.

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In your ticket analogy you sort of skipped the part between cop accusing you and paying up where there's a trial. Apparently you've never been to traffic court but if you have been maybe you just didn't notice that they try everyone, even the people that don't show up.

You keep acting like these people could just go to court with the IP addresses they have but we've seen that happening and the courts are shutting it down before it even gets far enough into discovery to reveal a name due to lack of evidence. You're conflating cases like Thomas with the John Doe list of IP address shakedown fishing expedition cases. The outcomes have never been even remotely the same and you're just ignoring that there's a much much higher barrier to gain standing to sue than what's being used as proof positive under six strikes.

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I yell when the law/private agreement is broken, when it seeks to entrap the entirety of human creativity into one business model and allows a small select group aggressively shut down any attempt at another business model. When those being accused are stripped of their rights, are punished upon accusation, and are then not allowed defend themselves: on the rare occasion that they are, they're told that they can't use certain defences that the law says they should be allowed.

As I've said before, the right to free speech and the ability to make speech are the most fundamental aspects of a free and democratic society. When private individuals are given the power to censor speech and prevent people from using a neutral method to make speech, that's when I get mad. I don't give a hoopla about "stealing" even if it were true. Here, the cure, the shuttering of speech, is far worse than the supposed disease, the "theft" of files.

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I don't know whether to laugh or give up on humanity when I hear someone say being kicked off the internet as being 'appropriate level of sanctions' for being accused of downloading a few one dollar songs.

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"Just keep your pirate hands off other people's data, and you won't be troubled by "Six Strikes""

Six Strikes, as written, is no guarantee that even if I were a US citizen and completely following the law, that I would be safe. No. The only "evidence" Six Strikes needs is an IP address, and once the copyright holder has that (and they don't even need to be the copyright older, only claim that they are) then they can start accusing and knowing that their accusations lead to punishments, all without letting the accused have their say. There is no protection in Six Strikes for those who are innocent.

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I accuse you six times of infringing on my copyright. Now you're banned from the Internet. Have a nice day. Oh wait, you actually want to contest it? I pick my best friend as an arbitrator to determine if you've infringed. Oh look at that, now you're permanently removed from that service provider.

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Re: And what would you prefer?

How about:

We are the copyright owner of 'X' (see proof). We see you've downloaded 'X'. If you liked 'X' the current market value of 'X' is 'Y'. Please send payment via any of the methods indicated below. If you did not like 'X' here is a link to our other copyrighted works. Also, please do not share and/or remove these works if you did not or do not intend to purchase 'X'.

If you did not download 'X' please let us know as we seek to continually improves our systems and our customer satisfaction.

If you continue to download our copyrighted works without purchasing you could be subject to penalties imposed by your Internet Service Provider.

So - how about you all stop being a bunch of last century cunts and step up to today, engage and sell some shit?

"right to distribute" - as if that fucking matters anymore, seriously.

""ICE and the DOJ were already shuttering foreign sites without the aid of this supposedly essential anti-piracy legislation.""

Even if it were law it wouldn't stop the FBI or Hollywood etc. from getting foreign sites shutdown being as they get the domains for these foreign sites shutdown without due process and then if the site is perfectly legal in the company that the site operates in the US then turns round and says it was just all a mistake. So any law in process would be just a waste considering things the law carries on regardless of due process.

Clearly, Minion Cushing is pro-piracy.

Look, as I've said before, IF copyright is a valuable part of modern society -- and again, I don't see any other way for creators to have a chance at the income from their works, while also it's desirable to prevent mega-grifters like Megaupload -- then SOME degree of enforcement is necessary.

And yet you pirates WAIL that emailed warnings are some terrible punishment: "In addition, the punishment (in some cases, the loss of internet service) seems to greatly outweigh the crime." -- That's just silly. The crime (and yes, here I take it as actually committed) is exactly of mis-using the internet connection, so slowing or removing it is appropriate. It's not throwing you in chains and hard labor, so quit WHINING that your fundamental freedoms are violated by a PREVENTION after being fingered.

Now on the "actually committed": well, I think that it's easy to find: automated processes are adequate to locate suspects simply by looking at net traffic, and it's then easily verified. -- By the way, your precious Google can be used to rat you out by correlating visited pirate sites with download traffic.

And I'd bet half a red ripe plum that IF I could access the drives of Techdirt fanboys, I'd find infringed copyrighted content that they got for free. Not exactly a neutral crowd here.

THANKS for the advance build up, dolts above! I don't actually care about your feeble ad hom, but if I did, it'd be pleasing to see how you fear my comments.

Re: Re: Re: Clearly, Minion Cushing is pro-piracy.

"EVEN IF TRUE, doesn't make pirates LESS of pirates, now does it? I suppose you think that because Hitler and Stalin and Mao murdered millions that it's okay for you to murder just one person?"

As horrible as it is for you compare copyright infringement to mass murder...you'd still be the fool. You'd be the guy going after the people who've killed one person each, instead of the named mass murderers. We know Hollywood computers have been caught sharing files. It's beyond reproach - after all, it uses the same evidence gathering technique that Hollywood itself uses. If it disputes this method, then obviously the method itself is faulty and thus Hollywood shouldn't be using it against citizens.

Re: Re: Clearly, Minion Cushing is pro-piracy.

What about yourself? Is literally every single file on your computers completely and one hundred percent legit?

You might also want to look into how exactly you want to boost sales. That's the most important part, the reason copyright was given to exist in the first place, wasn't it? It was to ensure an income stream for the copyright holder, wasn't it? Well, how about after massively infringing many a game, I've then gone on to purchase them? Movies, TV shows, you name it. Most of what I do end up buying, I only buy because I had infringed on it beforehand.
You can increase enforcement all you want, but it does fuck all to increase sales. In fact, there is NOTHING in any plan of copyright enforcement that I have ever seen that actually addresses the age old economic question of "How do I entice the person to buy?"

No, you're the stupid sad little puppy who'd rather see his business burn to the ground rather than allow one file to be outside his control. And that's what you're really after. If I were an investor in your company, I'd call for your head on a platter, since what you spew does nothing to increase profits.

Re: Re: Clearly, Minion Cushing is pro-piracy.

That is the kicker. He doesn't WANT to look at our hard drives. Because he has a system where the only evidence required is an IP address. Such a system is much easier to work with, who cares if he doesn't have to do any work to verify that someone is actually guilty.

Re: Re: Re: Clearly, Minion Cushing is pro-piracy.

Re: Clearly, Minion Cushing is pro-piracy.

I don't see any other way for creators to have a chance at the income from their works

1.) Kickstarter. Worried you can't recoup the costs of your project? Then have YOUR potential customers pay them for you! Join now and we'll even show you how this can serve as free market research!

2.) Connecting with your fans. Every year I go to a handful of small art conventions and there I meet and talk with people who draw for a living. They don't work for huge corporations, or massive media industries, or the comic book companies. No, they take the time to make people like them, and like their work. You'd be amazed how much people will pay for skilled personalized work. Even in feilds where this is unfeasable, like movies, you can always provide new and interesting content, while your 'freetard' competitors can at best offer up your old projects. Pump your fans up about a project and they'll pay to see it happen.

3.) Monetise non-digital offerings related to your work. After building up a brand like offering, provide side merchandise like mugs or t-shirts, messengerbags and other neat swag in some way relevant to your offerings. With all your existing digital projects complete, you now have several tools to get people interested in your future offerings, and will gain loyal followings that will support you in spite of the 'free-tard' hordes.

There you go. 3 ways to monitize that don't directly rely on suing and slandering the people who like your product. You may notice a trend amongst them.

Re: Clearly, Minion Cushing is pro-piracy.

Look, as I've said before, IF copyright is a valuable part of modern society - then it should be taxed as property and appropriate property taxes paid by the 'owners' of said property each and every year. Each and every 'lost sale' should be taxed appropriately to the company claiming the loss.

If the property is no longer of enough value to pay taxes on, then it should be released into the public domain for anyone to use freely.

You want to own it and punish others for using it, you should be paying for it just like any other 'real' property. Or are you willing to admit that your presciou IP isn't really property? I doubt it, copyright maximalists want to have their cake and eat it too... greedy copymaxtards....

Re: Clearly, Minion Cushing is pro-piracy.

Really? How would you know this? How can you prove ANYTHING of the accusations you are leveling?

WHAT PROOF DO YOU HAVE??

Under this so-called "law", there is no proof; there is no due process; there is no presumption of innocence. Therefore, it is merely a violation of the 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments; and a massive shakedown by the **AAs to supplement their bottom lines, because they're just a bunch of thieves who have abused every tax loophole possible, bribed every dirty public official they could find, and bought as many "laws" as they could to extort money from ordinary people with the threat of a "letter", or "jail", or "no Internet".

And by being their fluffers, bob and OOTB, you perpetuate the same CRIMES they are perpetuating, and their leashed sycophants the CRIMES they are committing perverting our laws into the joke they've become.

Re: Re: Clearly, Minion Cushing is pro-piracy.

Under this so-called "law", there is no proof; there is no due process; there is no presumption of innocence. Therefore, it is merely a violation of the 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments; and a massive shakedown by the **AAs to supplement their bottom lines, because they're just a bunch of thieves who have abused every tax loophole possible, bribed every dirty public official they could find, and bought as many "laws" as they could to extort money from ordinary people with the threat of a "letter", or "jail", or "no Internet".

You piracy apologists are the only ones claiming six strikes is some kind of law. It's not. Only the government is bound by the constitution and owes you due process. Maybe try reading the TOS.

Re: Re: Re: Clearly, Minion Cushing is pro-piracy.

The proponents of "six strikes" (the **AAs, participating ISPs, anti-piracy flamejobs, you) all say it's a "law" with "legal consequences" for "ILLEGAL ACTIVITY"... hm, gee, who gets to define the word "illegal"??

sure as hell ain't you.

Once again, you miss the point: it's not about actual "illegal activity": it's about profit, and making sure they (and their shills--YOU) maximize them, at the innocents' expense.

If it were about "illegal activity", we wouldn't be having a discussion about "criminalizing customers"; we would be discussing how the latest LAW ENFORCEMENT raid on a massive duplicating plant in Mexico/Shanghai/Malaysia/Thailand/India/etc went down, and how much PIRATED stuff they confiscated.

But, no: we get to talk about how Little Jimmy and his family got bankrupted--not incarcerated, BANKRUPTED!-- because he shared his copy of some lame pop song with his friend and neighbor (which is the whole point of FAIR USE and cultural binding); and the mass duplication pirates get away scot-free.

This us where you shills and your behavior becomes so baffling: you defend this egregiously ridiculous behavior and unfathomable shortsightedness; you look the other way when there is yet another miscarriage of so-called "justice", and yet another individual is convicted of an alleged "crime" without due process, and without a jury of her peers.

"Kangaroo court", much?? Or, should it be "profit über alles"?

Either way, it still marks you as a hypocrite who won't even post in the open, preferring to hide behind the "cloak of anonymity"... pretty much like your leash holders, who hide behind a "law" that clearly is a gross miscarriage of justice, and a mockery of our entire society, much less our belief system.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Clearly, Minion Cushing is pro-piracy.

Either way, it still marks you as a hypocrite who won't even post in the open, preferring to hide behind the "cloak of anonymity"... pretty much like your leash holders, who hide behind a "law" that clearly is a gross miscarriage of justice, and a mockery of our entire society, much less our belief system.

Is this a joke or something? You're calling me out anonymously? You call me a hypocrite for posting anonymously in your anonymous post? Well, you win the prize for being the most clueless douchenozzle of the week.

By the way, how's Little Jimmy going to get bankrupted by Six Strikes again?

And for the record, I've never said anything about the "law". This is strictly a TOS thing. Obviously you have your head wedged too far up your ass to pick up on this.

Nice to see you challenge Silverscarcat for the title of Techdirt's Special Ed Scholar Of The Week.

the most worrying things are that law enforcement agencies are more worried about protecting the USA entertainment industries than preventing and solving 'real crime'!
that the entertainment industries can have so much influence that a government can ignore almost everything in favour of preventing innovation so as to preserve a decades old industry
that laws that have been rejected for whatever reason can still be brought into play anyway, at the whim of particular industries, but just done a bit at a time. the effect being exactly the same as if the whole 9 yards had been brought into play as was originally tried.
that nothing will be spared in the entertainment industries quest for total domination of a service that should be for the benefit of all. that with a bit of sense and foresight can be good for business and customers alike
that all who use this service except the entertainment industries are criminals and do so to achieve nothing other than what is detrimental to those particular industries.

Competition

Seems like if I was in the ISP business these days, I'd see this as a great way to sell myself over my competitors.

"We're the only ISP that hasn't been lubed up and bent over by the RIAA and the MPAA. If you sign on with us, you'll never get a 'strike warning' or be throttled because some record company doesn't like you."

While MAFIAA still rears its ugly head and the stooge ISP's do their thing I will just download everything.
Simple psychology...........you frak with me and I do the same back to you.
My Firewalls and VPN render me invisible.Stuff that up your Butt Big Content !

Buy and Support the Indie Art and your Local Art ! Boycott and even Download the MAFIAA Stuff !

Sick Strikes

They figured out that the copyright trolling model (ala Righthaven, Prenda) wasn't going to work after their first high profile win brought public outrage and awareness.

If they think it is okay to set up a system where you lose your internet connection after six false accusations, with no judicial review, and no recourse, then it should work both ways. They should be fine with losing their own internet access after six false accusations. After all, they want to impose that harm upon everyone else.

Before a punishment or sanction, you first should have to be found guilty of something.

Some of you Yanks are crazy....

Seems like many of your politicians are happy to let one certain industry lobby group fight to keep your machine-guns, while happy to let another industry lobby group or 2 fight to take away your access to the internet.

Given that knowledge is power, which represents the greater attack on The Land of the Free...?

Re: Some of you Yanks are crazy....

I can still obtain information without an Internet; it's just a slower process.

I can NOT protect said information, or the fruits of that information, from those that would take it from me, especially without due process of a law (a binding contract between the GOVERNED and the GOVERMENT--which is itself an instrument of the GOVERNED), that must be invoked, and violation proven, in a court of law, without a gun.

I am very surprised that the MPAA and the RIAA are not getting more public disdain fall out over this. With actions like this collusion between two industries is it any wonder why people actually hate them both?

The above is exactly how I feel when it comes to the MAFIA we now have in the entertainment industry and key to why I refuse to pay for music or movies. I will not support an industry I don't like at all.

I sincerely hope the public gets teed off royally over this and all the mistakes that are bound to come given DtecNet's poor batting average in the past at getting it right.

The kangaroo court that has been set up to hear prostrations of innocence is a stacked deck that won't take too long for a lot of people to figure out what's going on.

What it makes me want to do, is start gathering up stuff from pirated sites to share off line as a way of civil protest over these actions. They can hunt all they want then for an IP number. It would be much faster to share several TBs off line, without the torrent IP tracer.

What it does not do, is encourage me to buy. Rather it totally pissed me off that at any time I can be hit by a false accusation as has already been shown to happen on the first day.

Re:

Because many customers are still unaware they are enrolled in this program.
Much of the 'regular' media coverage talks about all of the billions being stolen by evil pirates and this system will fix that problem.

People fail to understand that this is Corporations making Corporate Law and enforcing it on people who subsidize the 2 players in the game.

We give the cartel membership incentives to make shows that were so important they were renewed when they dodged the fiscal cliff. They earn billions but we have to hand them money to keep making things. The ISPs get easements, tax breaks, handouts to make sure everyone gets 'broadband' as defined with slightly faster than dialup as being broadband.

So these 2 industries we are supporting decided they get to be Judge, Jury, Executioner of allegations made by a flawed company that exists to keep the piracy is destroying the world narrative alive.

Everyone assumes its only bad people who will get more than a single notice... so until they are screwing 'regular' people no one will notice... and then the pot is boiling around us poor frogs.

bob and out_of_the_lube are mad because of one very fundamental fact. "IP address equals to accusation equals to penalties" is fast coming under the scrutiny of judges after their best model heroes in Prenda managed to royally fuck things up. Their investigative companies like Logistep have to break laws in order to get out_of_the_lube's favourite "SOME LEVEL OF ENFORCEMENT IS NEEDED". And now judges are shining the light all the cockroaches are running around like headless chickens.

The very fundamental of out_of_the_lube's precious enforcement is starting to get canned by judges because it's completely unreliable as evidence and has an accuracy of two out of two million. No wonder they're pissed off.

Funny, I don't know why six strikes is called Soft SOPA. SOPA never had a notification provision. The ads and payment processors component was there. I guess it sounds more demonic when linked to SOPA.

Anyway, you freetards successfully killed SOPA and got this instead. Nice job!! Keep up the good work.

Re:

Three years later you still sound like you've got Dodd's jizz up your cunny. Still haven't killed all the pirates, have you? How's the progress of your strikes now that every country with them has realized the plan is fucked beyond belief?